A corpus based study of morpheme deletion in a low resourced language: A case study for Embosi
Résumé
Several studies show that Embosi (Bantu C25) has systematic vowel elision and morpheme deletion. Forced alignments were used to study pronunciation variants in an Embosi speech corpus. We found many examples where associative morphemes are phonetically detected in the context of vowel elision. The speech tool also located many instances of associative morphemes being deleted. We found that 75.9% of instances of ya were deleted. We observe that this morpheme has a high frequency of deletion compared to the other associative morphemes. This compelling evidence suggests that the morpheme ya is treated differently by speakers than other associative morphemes.